Joerg Moellenkamp shares a cheatsheet for configuring the networking in Solaris 11 in a recent post. In doing so he remarks that improvements in Solaris 11 have made network configuration easier since one need no longer edit files but instead can use CLI-based tools to change file parameters. Further, he writes, the use of SMF makes determining when changes become active clear. Step by step, then, he shows the code involved in configuring networking in the OS, and he shows how it can be done both manually and automatically.
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In his recent post on Less known Solaris 11 features, Joerg Moellenkamp discusses the shadow migration feature of the ZFS Storage Appliance, which enables users to do migrations of data in the background. For example, Moellenkamp writes, imagine you want to replace a RAIDZ with RAID10. Shadow Migration is the perfect tool for this procedure, as Moellenkamp illustrates in his how-to. With the Shadow Migration feature, he writes, you can migrate the data from one local or remote filesystem to another, while you are already accessing the new one to get the data on the old ZFS filesystem.
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At greater length than typical Joerg Moellenkamp muses about issues like migration and upgrades, noting the importance of making purchases of either with attention to the expiration of support agreements. (Why upgrade to Solaris 11 if you have hardware issues that will shorten its useful life in your enterprise, for example?) He concludes his reflections with the comment that, "The future of any technology in the marketplace [SPARC, for instance] isnt decided on - sorry - outdated systems, it will be decided on current and future systems. Otherwise you may win the fight because we can run Solaris on old gear, but lose the war. And sorry everything needed to win or have at least the usual balance is okay to me. Even when it means that my playground systems in the basement are now not enabled to be upgraded to Solaris 11 FCS."
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Joerg Moellenkamp ponders the subject of avoiding block corruption in deduplications of a file system.. The problem lies in the deduplication process not knowing whether a block is essential or merely a datablock. The answer, he says, acknowledging the work done by Robin Harris, is to create redundancies by dispersing data to several disks (by mirror or parity RAIDs). No dedup mechanism inside a device can dedup away your redundancy when you write it to a totally different and independent device, he concludes confidently.
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Among the recent records set by Oracle technology is the one reported in SPARC Enterprise M8000 with Oracle 11g Beats IBM POWER7 on TPC-H @1000GB Benchmark. In this instance an Oracle SPARC Enterprise M8000 server configured with SPARC64 VII+ processors, Oracle's Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array storage, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 achieved a TPC-H performance result of 209,533 QphH@1000GB with price/performance of $10.13/QphH@1000GB, surpassing the performance of the IBM POWER7 server on the 1 TB TPC-H decision support benchmark.

The benchmark revealed that the SPARC Enterprise M8000 server delivers higher performance than the IBM Power 780 even though the SPARC VII+ processor-core is 1.6x slower than the POWER7 processor-core. The SPARC Enterprise M8000 server was found to be 27% faster than the IBM Power 780. IBM's reputed single-thread performance leadership did not provide benefit for throughput in this test.
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